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FAA Releases Requirements for Space Tourism

Posted by Zonk on from the good-luck-space-cadet dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Due to companies such as Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and Benson Space (SpaceDev) announcing their commercial spaceflight ambitions, the FAA has just released space flight requirements for safety and experimental permits. Virgin Galactic has already received nearly 200 bookings while Benson Space just recently started accepting reservations, although they plan to be first. The companies desire to have tourists in space as early as 2008 or 2009. All that it takes is a spare two hundred thousand dollars, and maybe a little courage."

13 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Who cares? by bogaboga · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, I wonder who really cares. If the FAA starts making tourism such a hassle, most would be tourists will go to space via Russia, on Russian rockets that are more reliable and on the cheap! Now beat that.

    1. Re:Who cares? by TheWart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or people might like the thought of flying with companies that have strict rules regarding safety, etc, espcially when you are rocketing into outer space.

    2. Re:Who cares? by tehcrazybob · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I care. I care a lot. I mean, don't get me wrong, I don't care if the airlocks are any good or whether the passengers are allowed to bring food on the flight. I also don't care about the insurance regulations, fire extinguishers, acceptance of liability, or anything else like that. If I'm ever a passenger, I might care about those things, but right now I'm not a passenger, so those things are completely irrelevant.

      What I DO care about are the things I didn't see in that article. Like what people can leave up there, and where they can go. The most significant part of getting something into space is accelerating it to 17,000 miles per hour. The rest, all the computers and airtight boxes full of people and fire extinguishers to stop the people catching fire, is just garnish.

      Now, aside from tourists and science experiments that are probably important but don't really affect me, the space around earth is cluttered with two things - communications satellites and debris. The communications satellites are absolutely essential for modern technology to work. I imagine you'll be using at least one as you read this sentence. The other one, the debris, is a big issue. It's small rocks, and bits and pieces of old rockets, and satellites that ran out of fuel and were moved out of their orbit to a less important one to clear the way for a new satellite. These rocks and bits of metal are all still moving at 17,000 miles per hour - the have to be, in order to stay in their orbits.

      When the debris hits anything important, the important thing stops being important and becomes more debris. Fortunately, that doesn't happen very often. NASA keeps track of all the biggest chunks, and keeps satellites and space stations out of the way. They just accept the risks posed by the stuff too small to track, since space is quite large and the chances of one hitting something important are acceptably small. However, if private companies start throwing things into space and don't bring it all down, the debris is going to become overwhelming, and space will become absolutely useless for communications, navigation, science, AND tourists. We'd also be trapped on Earth and unable to explore other planets until we can come up with a way to clear the debris, or just wait a few million years for it to clear up naturally.

      Personally, I like the internet, cell phones, GPS, and pictures of Mars. I'd like to keep space as free of debris as possible, and I'd really like to see regulations governing what can be left in orbit and where.

      --
      Computers need to explode more often.
    3. Re:Who cares? by evanbd · · Score: 3, Interesting
      While I basically agree with what you said, you're a little off target. These rules are really for suborbital tourism, aka the SpaceShipOne flight -- up and down, not orbit. That's much easier technically, and doesn't involve the 8 km/s sideways velocity of an orbital flight. Also, the vehicles people are talking about so far will only go to a little over 100 km altitude, which is lower than any Low Earth Orbit satellite -- even at 100 km, the air is so thick orbits decay rapidly.

      So, at least for this first generation of vehicles, there's no real worry about space collisions. These rules are more aimed at dealing with things like participant awareness of the risks, and protecting the uninvolved public. Both very important things, and fortunately AST (the branch of the FAA in charge of space flight stuff) is taking a very sane and reasonable approach to most of this.

  2. Re:Its dead Jim. by SpiffyMarc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, I know what you mean -- it ruined the prospect of commercial aviation, too!

  3. I have the courage by Typingsux · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now who has the 200 thousand dollars.

    --
    The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
  4. I can't wait by misanthrope101 · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's going to be a real pain to be made to remove your space boots before you enter the airlock.

  5. Telemetry by 1310nm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Something I noticed while skimming the document is that they're not entirely ruling out vehicles guided entirely from "the ground" via telemetry, stating that redundant links should be safe enough, citing UAVs as an example.

    Boy, they have a lot of misplaced faith.

  6. Re:If it's worth it to you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    >> "...if you REALLY want it to be the only bit of tourism you ever do."

    If you want it to BE the only tour you ever do, try a U.S. Shuttle: the odds are still higher than a private flight and, everything going your way, they'll build a neat monument to you somewhere and schoolchildren will cry.

  7. Here we go again. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    If the FAA starts making tourism such a hassle, most would be tourists will go to space via Russia, on Russian rockets that are more reliable and on the cheap! Now beat that.


    This is, yet again, why I can't stand /. stories about space. The commenters rarely know jack shit about space exploration, space flight, space robotics, or space commercialization. Yet they often unfortunately think they do.

    The FAA regulations are good. They were well thought out, in careful consultation with the parties involved.

    They require things like informing passengers about the risks, and obtaining written consent. They clarify the liabilities and responsibilities of parties involved. They require insurance based on the maximum-probable loss resulting from operations.

    They don't impose a massive paperwork burden. They allow the participants to assume great risk, while mandating some basic, sane, minimum standards, and they aim to mimimize (not eliminate) the risk to uninvolved third parties.

    The commercial spaceflight companies wanted these rules. They provide a well-defined regulatory environment. If you're building a rocketship that will be carrying people, you want to know roughly for what you can be sued or thrown in jail.

    Oops, sorry. I recant. Our elected Federal government enacted regulations. That must hurt pioneering development and be bad. I forgot.
    1. Re:Here we go again. by arthurpaliden · · Score: 4, Funny

      They allow the participants to assume great risk, while mandating some basic, sane, minimum standards, and they aim to mimimize (not eliminate) the risk to uninvolved third parties.

      Like shoe checks and no liquids since they might be parts of binary explosives.

      --
      Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
  8. Its the liability by Harmonious+Botch · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "The commercial spaceflight companies wanted these rules. They provide a well-defined regulatory environment."

    These rules are driven by politics, not by sound engineering. Most of the people making the rules probably don't know enough about flying to fold a paper airplane.

    What the rules provide - that is of greatest interest to big companies - is liability protection. If a company kills people or destroys property, but they can point to laws and say that they were acting within the law, their liability is decreased, or at least limited.

    All other things being equal, most companies do not want any government agency to tell them what to do. But with the current lawsuit-happy culture that we have, they can't get the necessary venture capital unless they can demonstrate limits to liability. At this stage, before there are paying customers, venture capital is the primary if not sole source of funding.

    ( And, yes, the rules will probably hurt development. Remember, this is the same government that thought that it was a good idea to put a teacher into a problem-plagued shuttle, and that thinks that terrorists use hair gel. )

    1. Re:Its the liability by georgewilliamherbert · · Score: 5, Informative
      These rules are driven by politics, not by sound engineering. Most of the people making the rules probably don't know enough about flying to fold a paper airplane.
      Please don't go around sticking your foot in your mouth. The anon coward a few back is an industry outsider (I have a guess who, but it's obvious from what they said that they at least know the insiders). I participated in some of the discussions leading to comments filed with the FAA about the proposed rules which are now final. I know most of the people who wrote the industry comments, and saw a number of the comments in draft form prior to submittal. The FAA AST staff who did this are also people who've come out into the community. The industry objected to some details of the proposed rules; those objections are noted appropriately and either got changed or explained well enough that the justification is sensible, though some of us may disagree with individual pieces of it. The rest of it was ok, with a little jockeying back and forth to optimize some of our particular operating paperwork burdens for our spacecraft designs. Characterizing this as random government abuse of a new industry is bullshit.